Killers of the Flower Moon: A Formal Feeling

In one passage, perhaps the most affecting of the film, Ernest walks into their house, about to deliver yet another item of bad news. The camera, describing his guilty perspective, peeks into room after room, hesitantly gliding through the home. When he finally opens the door to the basement, where Mollie and the rest of her family have been hiding in fear, all he has to do is give her a look. She starts to moan and wail in her husky voice.

Gladstone’s performance as Mollie is the sad, true heart of this film, a force that connects the various strands of thematic substance not only in Killers but across many of Scorsese’s investigations. Killers is actually, in some ways, yet another Scorsese gangster flick, filled with unscrupulous, secretly organized types with no morality other than money, and a thin, nihilistic idea of what it means to enjoy a good life. But it is also, in the Jesuit sense, an examination of conscience, a white filmmaker’s prayerful, bracing questioning of what it means to live on this land. Scorsese, a cradle Catholic famously interested in vice, has long wrestled with the highest themes of his religion: sin and forgiveness, violence and grace. In this way, Mollie’s interior suffering—call it a Passion—can sometimes remind us of the travails of the Portuguese missionaries to Japan depicted in Silence (2016). Or of the baffled wanderings of Jesus, played by an ecstatic Willem Dafoe, in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). In Killers, and especially in the person of Mollie Kyle, Scorsese’s feuding interests in adrenal energy and contemplative reflection are finally, furiously twinned.

“I do love that money, sir,” Ernest says to his uncle William Hale by way of honestly assessing his own character. Hale, played by Robert De Niro, takes that information in stride—who doesn’t?—and wants to know even more. What kinds of women does his nephew like? As in, racially? “I like red. I like white. I like blue,” Ernest says, maybe accidentally painting the mental image of a sexualized United States flag. This dark collision between DiCaprio and De Niro, the chief prophet-protagonists of Scorsese’s oeuvre down the years, is so funny because of its agile handling of American types. De Niro is the wised-up operator, the calloused veteran, the kind of guy who shakes your lapels and gives you a lesson on the harder sides of life—how, indeed, to harden your own heart. Saul Bellow called this kind of person a “reality instructor.”

Hale struts around town offering his help and companionship to the Osage, pretending to be their foremost friend, speaking and praying quite fluently in their language. And yet he is also nakedly the author of their destruction. He suggests marriages that soon end in brutal sickness, provides advice to the tribal council that always comes to nothing and often ends in blood. Part of the horror-show quality of Killers is this portrait of the corrosive open secret. Everybody knows, nobody knows. The headrights of the Osage—their rightful possession of the oil—keep sliding downward toward the whites. In a montage of notionally “unexplained,” stubbornly uninvestigated deaths, we see a young Osage woman pushing a baby in a pram. Out of nowhere, a white man materializes: he placidly shoots her in the head. We’re informed that the death has been classified as a suicide. Whatever she once owned will now roll downhill to somebody else. Guess who?

The stoic certainty of this theft is always apparent in De Niro’s eyes. It’s also the guiding aesthetic behind Rodrigo Prieto’s cinematography, which takes broad daylight and human faces and turns them into a nightmarish instruction in the reality of the west at the turn of the twentieth century. In one sequence—yet another station of the cross—Mollie slowly approaches a ravaged corpse. She knows it’s her sister’s, but she must be holding on to hope that there’s been some mistake. We see a sea of faces, a crowd gathered to view the evidence of a lynching. We get the news through their expressions, even more than through the awful image to come. Prieto has worked as DP on The Wolf of Wall Street, Silence, The Irishman (2019), and now Killers. You might think of these films as making up an unquiet quartet on the theme of redemption—how abundantly available it is, how rarely grasped. Lately, Scorsese has doubled down on his natural moralism, aiming his art directly at the places and moments where human beings make decisions, take chances, head out in the direction of corruption or salvation. His and Prieto’s elegant compositions make X-rays of these junctures, and of the sure, inescapable ends toward which they lead.

This determinism can also be found in the music direction of Robbie Robertson, who somehow manages to best his always astute previous work with Scorsese. Killers’ scoring scorches the viewer. There is always a driving drum and a sharp, unlovely melody—guitar, horn, harsh singing—lurking somewhere in this film. Many of the most affecting musical moments meld Native rhythms and rock-and-roll sound, implying and enacting the great churn of American cultural synthesis even while the violence underpinning the encounter is on fervent display. The drums and bass lines, often melting into one another in a droning monotone, keep up a thread of gruesome suspense.

Thelma Schoonmaker’s fleet editing—here more patient and plangent than ever before, her vision maturing in tandem with her longtime collaborator Scorsese’s—sings in harmony with Robertson’s tunes. The message is clear: Fate isn’t just waiting for you. It’s seeking you out and gathering speed. Part of the texture of Schoonmaker’s work in Killers is her handling of the archival images. These photographs—of Osage families posing in high style, of lands that we now know to be spotted with innocent blood—pull at the film’s viewers, threading their consciousnesses into a quilt of complicity. Admire the images, swoon at the performances—still, there’s a constant, artifice-exploding whisper: this is real, this is real, this is real.

Hale is the bard of that sick realism. Speaking to his feckless nephew, he asks, “Ernest, you believe in the Bible? . . . Miracles of old? Expecting a miracle to make all this go away? You know they don’t happen anymore.” Scorsese and Eric Roth’s screenplay is full of brutal gems like this one, offering no escape. Ernest, as portrayed with such lyricism by DiCaprio, is a stupid, lazy man. Nobody tries to deny this. Somebody mentions his “disposition,” and everybody knows that it’s a reference to his dull intelligence. He likes whiskey and cash, wants to “sleep all day” and “make a party when it’s dark.” But in the moral world of Killers—hell, in any moral world worth its salt—this fact is no excuse for the betrayal Ernest carries out. He really loves Mollie and his children, and seems, childishly, to hope that he’ll earn some magical reprieve from the bargain he’s struck with his uncle. In this way, he’s not unlike any “unpolitical” American who, yeah, sure, understands the country’s past villainies but hopes he’ll stumble without too much work into a blameless, enjoyable life. Sin doesn’t work that way. Somebody’s got to say no.

DiCaprio’s two decades of collaboration with Scorsese have been walking in this direction all along. Like their first film together, Gangs of New York (2002), Killers is a work of minutely detailed world-building. The dust caking boots, the city streets, the dangerous landscape pregnant with symbolism: all of it researched and executed within an inch of its life. The verisimilitude feels like a hair shirt—a cleansing bit of painstaking work. DiCaprio’s performance has a touch of mortification in it too. His anguished, avoidant, sneaky, passionless facial expressions are always being undercut and made ironic by the light of truth—however distant—in his eyes. He might not comprehend the whole plan, but he knows his place in it, knows it’s wrong, is too slothful and worldly to wake up and make a cry of repentance.

The great gift of acting is that, in hands like DiCaprio’s, it can play two notes at once. We’re looking at a single man, in command of his own soul, but we are also witnessing a portrait of the national character. Killers was released in 2023, entering a world that had been chastened by the traumas and stirrings of 2020—among them the COVID-19 pandemic, worldwide rebellions following the killing of George Floyd, a conspicuous, Native-led Independence Day protest on the grounds of Mount Rushmore. Suddenly it was impossible to think of Scorsese’s fixation on spiritual reckonings in a totally personalized or privatized way. Sometimes sin happens in the heart; sometimes a whole society comes together to spill the blood of its brothers. The blood keeps crying out from the ground.

The decision to adapt David Grann’s historical tale and render it in such detailed and personal terms is a masterstroke—the latest of many thousands—by Martin Scorsese. Scraped through his tough vision, the story is, at once, a work of individual temptation and structural perdition. Scorsese’s boldest departure from Grann’s narrative, the choice to center the story on Ernest and Mollie instead of on the FBI investigation that uncovered William Hale’s crimes—on the personal instead of the official—follows Emily Dickinson’s injunction to “tell all the truth but tell it slant.” The relocation points a finger—indicting and beckoning all at once—toward contemporary audiences, who, in their private hearts and out in public, have never seemed so lost, or so unsure of where the crimes of the state end and their own blithe participation begins. To begin to contemplate this very modern problem is to experience even the most everyday aspects of our lives as—Dickinson again—a dazzling, harrowing, often painful “superb surprise.”

The filmmaker doesn’t exempt himself. Killers is, too, an excruciatingly personal exercise in self-questioning: What does it mean to live here? To work and gain “success” here? To make stories—entertainments—using such sordid materials? What does it mean to be attracted to the dark? Hence the second-to-last passage of Killers—perhaps the most abstract, ironic, and unabashedly artistic set piece of Scorsese’s career. The filmmaker, looking just like himself, stands at a microphone, producing a chintzy radio play about the massacre, sanding down the jagged edges to which we all just bore witness. It’s a falsely benign punch in the gut; a sick, miniature reiteration of the whole story; a densely packed symbol of storytelling and blood: the wages of history, and of narrative itself.